Nubank Customer Service: how do we use technology?

Whether it's an in-app chat, a phone call or an e-mail, Nubank's customer service has the mission of helping customers with all the questions they need. And with the awards it has received in its almost 11-year history, Nubank has already shown that it is possible to have a service that is both resolutive and charming. To make this possible, technology is a fundamental part of this process.

According to Túlio Oliveira, General Manager of Consumer Experience at Nubank, technology guarantees agility and efficiency in responding to customers, and also opens up space for increasingly specialized service. But all this without touching the most important base for the business: the customer.

"We managed to reach a point between seeking advances in technology, but maintaining the core, which is the customer at the center of everything. These two points are present in all Nubank structures and are aligned in customer service. Technology is a great vector that helps us live these values on a daily basis because it catalyzes the solution", he says.

Find out how Nubank uses technology to transform customer service into a unique experience.

Between technology and humans: the customer at the center of everything

Oliveira says that it is not all about how many people there are working on the customer service and whether they have all the most advanced technological tools at their disposal. Creating resolute and, at the same time, charming service is only possible when focusing on those who matter: the customers. They are at the center of the entire strategy. And this premise guides all decisions about which tools to use, how to use it and how the team addresses each situation.

“We serve almost 10 million tickets every month. The aim of every interaction is for our customers to leave liking us more than when they entered. And for this to happen, a huge framework of strategic vectors needs to be built, and it includes security, quality, efficiency and derivatives of these three pillars, such as personalizing the response. If you've contacted Nubank, you'll leave here happier after the interaction. And this is part of a premise that was born with Nubank”, Oliveira says.

More agile responses

Before even reaching a service agent, the customer can already have their doubts clarified in the Help Center, a section to resolve doubts in the application, which brings together not only frequently asked questions, but also practical and simple explanations about all products and services offered by Nubank. The Help Center already solves a large number of customer problems, and ensures that the service team focuses on the most complex issues.

When the customer still needs to get in touch, technology is an ally, as it is in the basic infrastructure of the systems that the service team uses, according to Oliveira. This allowed Nubank to innovate by guaranteeing customer service via chat within the application, saving waiting time on phone calls, for example.

"Most of our interactions are via chat, which is not the case with the majority of the market. And this point is a differentiator because chat is a friendlier channel for the customer and allows contact to be faster", he says.

Understand, apply, reevaluate

The process of creating something, testing and collecting learnings from customers is part of Nubank's culture in all areas, and it is also true in customer service. The area brings together a massive amount of data. All customer interactions are recorded in an aggregated and anonymized database that helps Nubank understand what their main pains and needs are.

Based on the intelligence generated by this data, the service area is able to design strategies to create customer service journeys that not only solve customers' pain points, but also delight them.

“We analyze every step of the customer journey here. We have quality metrics and we analyze every little change we make in this journey. If we add a tool at any point in the interaction, we assess whether the customer likes it or not. We test all the time in order to evolve”, explains Oliveira.

Artificial intelligence to reduce response time

In order to guarantee an increasingly resolutive service and reduce response times, the Global Platform team is designing Artificial Intelligence (AI) that helps the agent understand the customer's problem more quickly and find the answer they need.

“Nubank has an Artificial Intelligence development front for customer service, and we believe it will bring a lot of speed and assertiveness to the response. There is a project for Artificial Intelligence that reads customers' answers and questions in a chat and gives an agent a previous summary of what the customer wants. That way, the agent doesn't have to spend three or five minutes reading everything that's happened, and doesn't have to ask the customer any more questions. We reduce customer service time and increase customer satisfaction”, explains Oliveira.

The idea is that AI also helps the agent to find solutions for the customer more quickly. This all happens in minutes, before the customer interacts with the human, which is not discarded. "The agent has countless sources of knowledge to look for an answer, but given the complexity of the operation and the volume of products we have, it is not always very quick to find specific knowledge. So, the idea is that Artificial Intelligence helps to find this information. It will bring together this knowledge from various Nubank sources to provide the agent with specific data that helps the customer", he explains.

Increasingly specialized and humanized service

Helping customers resolve problems quickly is not the only mission of Nubank's customer service. The goal is to delight each person who passes through the customer service channels. According to Oliveira, ensuring faster responses and reducing service time pave the way for a more specialized and personalized service.

"The simplest and most common questions that only demands a quick solution, in the first interaction, Artificial Intelligence helps us. This way, we can give the team more time to dedicate to more specific issues, more sensitive situations and groups of customers who require more specialized service", says the executive.

Oliveira says this is a big step in the service strategy. "Technology will help us decide when it will solve everything and when we will need a personalized service, with people who solve what the customer needs. And at this point, in this decision, we cannot make mistakes. The victory here is to calibrate each of these things", he states.

Technology guarantees greater support in more sensitive cases

With people's financial lives increasingly concentrated on their cell phones and transactions increasingly digital, security has become one of the main concerns of customers and Nubank alike. In more sensitive cases, technology helps speed up resolution, but it is the human factor that matters. Nubank's customer service team is trained to ensure that customers have all the necessary information in sensitive situations.

“Security is one of the main topics today and always will be for everyone working in the financial market. That's why we work to make Nubank a source of security, a safe haven for our customers. And in this sense, technology, together with more educational communication, is a pillar for prevention. Our tools help us, for example, to know if it is the customer who is making a particular transaction, movement and purchase, or if it is the customer who is trying to access the application”, he explains.

In the event of problems such as improper transactions on the account or card, fraud or scams, the customer service is prepared to guarantee the necessary customer support that goes beyond technology. “Here there will always be a customer service that will provide the greatest possible comfort for the customer”, says Oliveira.

The next level of customer service

To ensure excellence in service, Oliveira explains some projects that are under development and that should take the area to the next level. One of them is a quality metric that goes beyond traditional NPS. NPS is a methodology for measuring customer satisfaction. Nubank's idea is to go beyond that, and understand which points the area got right and which it got wrong.

"Another work front that we have now opened is by product and segment. We are listening, on a weekly basis, to specific complaints about our products and segments to understand the root of these complaints. This data is passed on to the Products and Segments team, who resolve the cause. From there, we measure again", explains Oliveira.

In other words, mapping the pains and needs of customers not only helps the area to find increasingly effective solutions in customer service, but also helps other areas of the company to find more massive resolutions, such as creating a new solution that solves a problem frequently reported in customer service. “This will change the level of our operation in the long term because we'll be able to not only catalog the main pains, but correct them in all instances”, he says.

Regardless of these and other projects that are advancing in the customer service area with the help of technology, what won't change, according to Oliveira, is the direction of what is most important to the customer.

“The evolution of technology is going to bring a lot of things here and will require new team profiles and new skills, but if this isn't aligned with our values, everything will fall apart. It's our ongoing work. We're going to keep growing, we're going to keep testing new tools, we're going to keep creating new solutions, but our values need to be lived out in every contact we have with our customers, who will continue to be the center of everything,” he adds.